It is the office and duty of the historian to seek out facts, to distinguish the true from the false, to sift the wheat from the chaff, to preserve the one and to relegate the other to the oblivion to which it belongs.
Tested by the canons that the most judicious scholars have adopted in the investigation of all early history, we cannot doubt that the Northmen made four or five voyages to the coast of America in the last part of the tenth and the first part of the eleventh centuries; that they returned to Greenland with cargoes of grapes and timber, the latter a very valuable commodity in the markets both of Greenland and Iceland; that their abode on our shores was temporary; that they were mostly occupied in explorations, and made no preparations for establishing any permanent colony; except their temporary dwellings they erected no structures whatever, either of wood or of stone. We have intimations that other voyages were made to this continent, but no detailed account of them has survived to the present time.
These few facts constitute the substance of what we know of these Scandinavian discoveries. Of the details we know little: they are involved in indefiniteness, uncertainty, and doubt. The place of their first landing, the location of their dwellings, the parts of the country which they explored, are so indefinitely described that they are utterly beyond the power of identification.
But I should do injustice to the subject to which I have ventured to call your attention, if I did not add that writers are not wanting who claim to know vastly more of the details than I can see my way clear to admit. They belong to that select class of historians who are distinguished for an exuberance of imagination and a redundancy of faith. It is a very easy and simple thing for them to point out the land-fall of Leif, the river which he entered, the island at its mouth, the bay where they cast anchor, the shore where they built their temporary houses, the spot where Thorvald was buried, and where they set up crosses at his head and at his feet. They tell us what headlands were explored on the coast of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and what inlets and bays were entered along the shores of Maine. The narratives which they weave from a fertile brain are ingenious and entertaining: they give to the sagas more freshness and greater personality, but when we look for the facts on which their allegations rest, for anything that may be called evidence, we find only the creations of an undisciplined imagination and an agile fancy.
It is, indeed, true that it would be highly gratifying to believe that the Northmen made more permanent settlements on our shores, that they reared spacious buildings and strong fortresses of stone and mason-work, that they gathered about them more of the accessories of a national, or even of a colonial existence; but history does not offer us any choice: we must take what she gives us, and under the limitations which she imposes. The truth, unadorned and without exaggeration, has a beauty and a nobility of its own. It needs no additions to commend it to the historical student. If he be a true and conscientious investigator, he will take it just as he finds it: he will add nothing to it: he will take nothing from it.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] If it be admitted, as it is almost universally, that the Scandinavians came to this continent in the last part of the tenth or the early part of the eleventh century, it is eminently fitting that a suitable monument should mark and emphasize the event. And it seems equally fitting that it should be placed in Boston, the metropolis of New England, since it simply commemorates the event of their coming, but is not intended to indicate their land-fall, or the place of their temporary abode.
[2] The mariner's compass was not discovered till the twelfth or thirteenth century.
[3] This statement rests on the interpretation of Professor Finn Magnusen, for which see "The Voyages of the Northmen to America," Prince Socely's ed., pp. 34, 126. Boston, 1877. The general description of the climate and the products of the soil are in harmony with this interpretation, but it has nevertheless been questioned. Other Icelandic writers differ from him, and make the latitude of the land-fall of Leif at 49° 55', instead of 41° 43' 10", as computed by Magnusen.